"The Meanest, Most Arrogant, Obnoxious Little Brat I Have Ever Met in My Life"

What is a documentary now? Would you turn against your alma mater? Why did a fan throw a beer bottle at Dan Le Batard's head? And is America just Miami? Child star turned muckraker Billy Corben knows. Plus: Night Court, 2 Live Crew, Jughead Jr., corruption, cocaine... and pool boy cucking. Further content: • Watch "The U" https://www.rakontur.com/the-u and "The U Part 2" https://www.rakontur.com/the-u-part-2 • Watch "30 for 30: Broke" https://www.netflix.com/title/70239460 on Netflix • Watch "Cocaine Cowboys" https://www.rakontur.com/cocaine-cowboys-the-kings-of-miami on Netflix • Watch "God Forbid" https://www.rakontur.com/god-forbid on Hulu • Subscribe to Billy Corben's Rakontur https://www.youtube.com/@rakonturmiami on YouTube • Subscribe to "The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz" https://pod.link/934820588 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Break it down, would you please?

• 0:13Pablo Torre?

  And if you listen to our show on Apple Podcasts, you can now watch video there as well. Just update to the latest iOS, head over to our show page to start watching. But for right now, just a quick word from our sponsors.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone, and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up! Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 1:02Pablo Torre?

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• 1:45Pablo Torre?

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• 2:11Pablo Torre?

  I was like, alright, I'll see how it goes over. Like a fart in a submarine.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Pablo, Billy, I asked Billy if he knows what he's doing and he said he did not know what we were doing today. Did you want to tell him what we're doing? Or you want to make it a surprise?

• 2:23Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I don't really want to tell him.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:26Pablo Torre?

  I want Billy to feel like how so many of his subjects feel when they sit down across from him when he does documentaries about them.

• 2:38Pablo Torre?

  So you may have noticed that we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out like to tackle big topics and big characters. Two of the three Emmys that we were just nominated for last week, in fact, were for our investigations into aspiration and the Clippers, and Riley Gaines and her role in this administration. But as much as I enjoy tackling subjects that the yes-men in sports will not touch, I also remain obsessed with little topics. And lil characters. Which brings us to one very specific guest star on a seminal television sitcom that has been lodged inside of my brain for more than 35 years now.

• 3:22Pablo Torre?

  And if you, like me, grew up watching Night Court on NBC, you may remember this tiny lil guest star as well.

• 3:32Speaker 05

  I don't mean to bother you, but would you mind signing my autograph book?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Roz, make yourself useful. Get this chrome-dome freak of nature away from me.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  Alright, that's it. Send for the littlest lawyer to meet the big bad bailiff.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  You are the meanest, most arrogant, obnoxious little brat I have ever met in my life.

• 3:56Speaker 05

  You only want me around because nobody else can stand you. Well, let me tell you something, I can't stand you either. And you can take your little blackmail tape and do whatever you want with it. I have had enough.

• 4:05Speaker 06

  You can't talk to Billy like that.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  Not like that? Oh, shut up, you overpaid parrot.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  And you, you don't care about Billy at all.

• 4:14Pablo Torre?

  In this episode, in case you were wondering, a child star named Billy shows up one day to shoot a television show in the same Manhattan criminal court where Night Court takes place. But the more important thing to know here is that Billy is a tyrannical [BLEEP].

• 4:32Speaker 05

  All you care about is keeping him happy long enough to do your stupid TV show. It goes for all of you. You're an army of yes men.

• 4:42Pablo Torre?

  Fairly recently, however, after more than three decades of hating this specific character, a cautionary tale for precocious children everywhere, I found out something shocking. I found out that the actor who played that child was someone whom I've known, it turns out, for years, which meant that we could call Billy up. I mean...

• 5:12Speaker 07

  You crushed it.

• 5:14Speaker 07

  An obnoxious child actor named Billy. It was really typecast. It's rare to see a method child actor. That was the most fun, because that was a show that I watched as a kid, and you could do anything you wanted on that show, but be mean to Bull. That's when the audience would immediately, you know, Bull the bailiff, they would immediately turn, uh, turn on you.

• 5:33Pablo Torre?

  And so, yes, I just gotta take a moment to recognize that after a truly and disturbingly extensive career as a child star, which we will get back to later, Billy Corben went on to direct some of the most entertaining documentaries ever, many of which are devoted to muckraking and accountability journalism in his hometown of Miami and at his alma mater, the University of Miami. Meaning that Billy Corben is a bit of a kindred spirit to PTFO. And also that he too has continued to inspire various audiences to turn on him in real life. But I first met Billy Corben when he was interviewing me for a 30 for 30 documentary

• 6:17Pablo Torre?

  titled Broke back in 2012. And many years before that, he had also sat down with the other allegedly unlikable friend of PTFO who's with us here today, Metalark founder and former Miami Herald columnist, Dan Lebatard.

• 6:37Pablo Torre?

  What was it like to interview Dan? Real easy.

• 6:41Speaker 07

  It actually was real easy because Dan, I think, was the last interview on both the You and the You Part One. And so we knew exactly what we needed. And so it was just like a hit list of facts and stats and, and soundbites that we needed. So it was actually a pretty streamlined operation, as I recall.

• 7:02Pablo Torre?

  That's my experience with you as well, from 2012, was that You Do Broke, which was, of course, the first thing I ever was involved with at ESPN when I first got hired there. And you were making this documentary that was rooted in the reporting I'd done for Sports Illustrated. And then, at the very end of your process, it's like, let's get that guy in. And I sit down and I basically get spackle over all of the exposition that I think you guys were missing. And I'm so glad I did it. But you just described what you used me for.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  He's not, he's not glad he did it. He's not proud of that one. I've heard him say before that I loved it. And it's pornography. It's the easiest thing in the world to watch.

• 7:41Pablo Torre?

  How dare you? Because now I'm, I'm resembling the pornographic content. Because that story, I mean, that doc, Billy, the impact of Broke, How When My Athletes Go Broke, was wildly popular and made waves in sports. Like, everyone started talking to me about that [BLEEP]. Because, in part, you elevated the whole thing that apparently you're deeply not proud of.

• 8:02Speaker 07

  No, Dan's not wrong. Your Sports Illustrated article is really what inspired the documentary Broke. And of course, like, right away, the NFLPA had pushed back on you and your, and your shock horror stats and everything.

• 8:18Pablo Torre?

  My first run-in with the NFLPA, yeah, more than, god, a decade ago.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I remember the story, and I remember a detail above all others. I'm not even sure Pablo remembers this detail. Former Twins outfielder Torrey Hunter invested in floating furniture in the event of a flood. It seemed like a good idea to me. It really did. Especially with climate change. I feel like it's a better idea today. He wasn't wrong, he was just early.

• 8:45Speaker 07

  So yeah, so that's where I met Pablo. I think when I met him, I was like, we're waiting on your dad to come so we can interview him. Uh, he was like fresh from his bar mitzvah. He was like, look how young he is. I feel like Dan and I are aging and you're like getting younger somehow, but.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  Oh no, give him time working for me. I'll make it, I'll make it age faster. I'll make all of it happen faster.

• 9:07Pablo Torre?

  The soul dies before the Asian skin does, unfortunately.

• 9:29Pablo Torre?

  So for people who don't know Billy Corben, I mean, you're one of the great sports documentarians of our era. What a sad era it's become, we can get to that.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Why just sports though? Why, I'd say he's, I'd say he's one of the great documentarians, period. I wouldn't put the sports qualifier on it.

• 9:43Speaker 07

  I thought you were saying drugs and sports.

• 9:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  And the best cocaine documentarian there is.

• 9:49Pablo Torre?

  That is first line of the obituary. The greatest cocaine chronicler of our time, Billy Corben.

• 9:55Speaker 07

  Who never did cocaine.

• 9:57Pablo Torre?

  I'm immediately finding out that Billy Corben has never done cocaine. The stolen valor, the stolen valor of the work you've done.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Oh, this guy is. No, wait a minute. You say, no, stolen valor is this guy has culturally appropriated every Miami thing that there is. Just the entire city of Miami, uh, all of the Hispanic, all of the Hispanic, all of it.

• 10:20Speaker 07

  My, my reggaeton career, all of it. Just now more than ever, people want songs about petrol and gasoline. So it's really taking off.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Gasolina.

• 10:33Pablo Torre?

  So Cocaine Cowboys, the franchise, that's Billy, as well as The U and the sequel to The U, The U Part Two. Screwball, Broke, aforementioned, Square Group, which is about weed. Bales of weed, not cocaine. And then 537 Votes, these are just some of the things on your list, but. We'll get to like the documentary stuff. I want to establish your origin story because there was a world in which Billy Corben is child actor and does get addicted to cocaine, incidentally. It's statistically seemingly very difficult to not do that. Because child actor is almost like this, this concept. Did you enjoy that?

• 11:11Speaker 07

  Oh, I loved it, yeah, because in Miami in the eighties, it was a ton of really cool shit happening in, in the world of television and movies and, and commercials. And so I, we had a friend from the neighborhood who I saw her on a, riding a bicycle in a Sears commercial, and I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I think I was six years old. And I said, I want to do that. So that's what, that became my like after school activity was going out on auditions. And I just wound up doing a national commercial for cereal or sandwich meats or toys or uh, department stores.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  With dreams of what though? Because when he mentions the cocaine addiction of a child actor, I think immediately of Drew Barrymore being in rehab at 13.

• 11:50Speaker 07

  Well, my, it's funny, my mom refused to participate in this hobby of mine because she read like Shirley Temple's autobiography and specifically I remember Drew Barrymore. I could picture the, the paperback like on our coffee table and she's like, this is a terrible business. At eight, they're drinking coffee, at nine, they're smoking pot, by 10, they're doing cocaine and she was totally against it for a while until I, I booked a movie called Parenthood with Steve Martin and Mary Steenburge and, and Joaquin Phoenix and, I mean, everybody was in that movie. Diane Weish was nominated for an Oscar, I think. Rick Moranis was in it, which was cool for me. Uh, Keanu Reeves and we had to go to Orlando. So then my mom, my dad had to work. It wasn't just like an after school thing, it was an overnight thing.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  So my mom had to go to Orlando with me and that's how she became, she would hate this term, my stage mom. And that's what kept me like on the straight.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  But with dreams of what though? What were you trying to become?

• 12:43Speaker 07

  There wasn't a career path. I started to become very successful at it, but it still didn't. It was really on Parenthood, I think, watching Ron Howard. His whole family was on set. They all had cameos. His daughter had a cameo, his wife had a cameo, his dad, his brothers in all of his movies. I watched him on Andy Griffith and I watched him on Happy Days and so... And then I watched him control this whole giant Universal Pictures operation. And I was like, "Oh, that's the goal." Like, when you grow up and you grow out of acting, you become the director and the producer. So that, that probably was the moment I thought, "Oh, if there's a trajectory or potential of, this year, that would be it."

• 13:21Pablo Torre?

  It's very funny to imagine that that's your trajectory, your imagined, dream trajectory, because when I've been grinding the game film of your career, and again, like reliving how great the You and the You Part Two were, and we'll get to the sports stuff in a second, I am realizing you go from villainous lil' kid, lil' lawyer on Night Court to a scene in the city of Miami in which your trajectory seems like it brought you back kind of to the same place.

• 13:51Speaker 08

  Frequent City Hall critic filmmaker Billy Corben came to the meeting to speak in favor of firing the city attorney, Victoria Mendez, who was accused in a lawsuit of real estate fraud.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  The city is drowning in a sea of scandals.

• 14:06Speaker 09

  The reason why people like you get to bully me every day and I don't lose sleep over you is because you are a vile little man.

• 14:16Speaker 08

  Are you a vile little man or not? I wear that badge proudly.

• 14:22Pablo Torre?

  I mean, you're basically the same exact character decades apart.

• 14:26Speaker 07

  Or she certainly sounds like the same character as Roz the bailiff on Night Court.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  You are the meanest, most arrogant, obnoxious little brat I have ever met in my life.

• 14:37Speaker 07

  Oh my god, that's... I don't, I didn't remember my answer to that question. I was waiting with bated breath. I was like, "Are you a vile little man?"

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Pablo, he has done so much of this in protection, in vigorous protection of nobility and decency in Miami. It's the thing I admire most about him. As wonderful of a filmmaker as he is, the fact that he'll stand outside of City Hall and wait for the mayor to park in his spot so the mayor just knows that he's always watching. He loses a lot of these fights, but he's always willing to fight them.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  Well, so you don't fight the fights, you can win, you fight the fights that are worth fighting?

• 15:11Pablo Torre?

  Well, one of the concepts that I do think brings you guys together here is, what does it mean to be likeable? And what does it mean to love something so much that you become regarded as an enemy of it?

• 15:24Pablo Torre?

  That is something I see in both of your careers and both of your trajectories. And I do think, starting with a conversation about the U is interesting, not just because it's the sports stuff. But like, Billy, we're living in this era in which the documentary is authorized. That's the kind that people want. Give us your IP.

• 15:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's no such thing as a documentary anymore. Yeah, that's not right. It's a thing, but it's not a documentary.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  You can call it trading access for the dilution of truth.

• 15:51Speaker 07

  Sure, I think that's accurate.

• 15:53Pablo Torre?

  Well, and look, there are ways to do it in which you can make an entertaining product. But as always on this show, we're kind of obsessed with vocabulary. Like, what gets to be a documentary, what should that even mean as a definition? And for those who don't remember, the making of the U, which involves, of course, the University of Miami, their players.

• 16:13Speaker 10

  The Miami squad made noise the moment it reached Phoenix. Somebody came up to me and said, hey, the players just got off the plane. They all had fatigues on.

• 16:20Speaker 11

  Oh my goodness, did that start a uproar. All week long, the players kept comparing this game to war. This game is gonna be a war and we're gonna be ready for it.

• 16:30Pablo Torre?

  Could you explain what permission you got before you made what was at the time, the highest rated 30 for 30, the highest rated documentary that ESPN had?

• 16:41Speaker 07

  We approached them not for permission to make the documentary or any authorization, but there were a couple of people at the time that were still employed by the university, who we wanted to interview because it was about the team from decades prior. And we wanted to get some footage in the Orange Bowl, which they did allow us to do. And then a weird thing happened. We were in the office of the-

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Sports Information Director.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, which, you know, just sort of internal propagandist and who really had seen so much of sports, local sports journalism, when you're a beat reporter covering a team, is access journalism. He really had the run of the town and the local media. But he said this to us, you know, if I were you, I would rethink doing this whole project. And I remember often I look at each other going like, well, that that ship sailed. You know, we we went to ESPN, we pitched this project, we we have it like, we're doing this project. It's really just a question of who we're going to get to interview and whether your perspective will be a part of it or not. But and I realized in talking to other sports reporters that this was his line.

• 17:51Speaker 07

  When they were interested in doing a particular story and they would approach this guy, he would give them that. You know, if I were you, I'd reconsider maybe doing this this story. And they were not just saying no, but they were proactively pushing back. When I went to Arizona to interview Dennis Erickson, he said to me after the interview, he's like, well, that went. I thought that went pretty well. I don't know what the university is so upset about. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, you know, UM, UM called him. Okay, they have no control over him anymore. He hasn't worked for them for decades. They called him and said, hey, if you get a call from these guys making a documentary for ESPN, don't do the interview. Now, to the credit of these former players and former employees, they didn't listen to the administration when they went there.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  You know, when they worked there, so they didn't listen this time. But it was weird having your own university working so hard against you. Then, when it came out, that actually drove a lot of interest in it because no one wants to see the authorized documentary. They want to see the documentary UM doesn't want you to see.

• 18:51Pablo Torre?

  Right. And telling the story that people don't want you to tell, that's my kink, right? That's like the thing I'm into. And Dan, a fellow alum, you have your own experience with this university. And I want to use the University of Miami as kind of a stand in for like what it's like to actually cover an institution. That's going to get mad at you because the best story available is not the one that they even recognize.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Billy did a love letter and it's the James Baldwin line of America, love it enough to criticize it. I love that school. I love my relationship with that program. That school is responsible for almost everything that I became in my career. I'm talking about all the teachings up to and including the University of Miami football team of the late 80s and early 90s. Taught me about race relations and a different side of Miami. That isn't where I grew up. And so, yeah, I've, I've got a ton of stories like Billy would, I imagine, that are complicated love letters that include, at one point, because I was writing articles that ended up with Sports Illustrated.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Sports Illustrated called for the death of the program. I got a beer bottle thrown across a bar that hit me in the chin. And one of my friends, who was like a week from graduating from medical school, had a kit of stuff and just stitched me up in the parking lot. I didn't even go to the hospital like 2 o'clock in the morning. Because people were really mad at me about the stuff that was happening. That was another thing I learned, like the insanity of fandom I had broken across my chin. Because I was learning one thing that I thought was important and real and the truth. And people viewed it obviously as a betrayal of the, of the program because they imagined me, I guess, in a cheerleader skirt. Sorry to do that to everybody.

• 20:38Pablo Torre?

  That was a, that, that is a beer bottle across our eyes.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  You did porn earlier. You did, we had you in porn earlier. This is, this is a lower rating.

• 20:48Pablo Torre?

  The graphic nature of Dan's journalism, Billy, for people who don't remember what Dan was dredging up. What warranted beer bottles being thrown by maniacs?

• 20:58Speaker 07

  Dan was very well sourced, being conveniently located on the campus. I don't know if it was about the bounties.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  It is about the bounties. For, for the people who don't know the story, Luther Campbell, the head of Two Live Crew who took his lyrics to the Supreme Court and won a freedom of speech case, was, before Snoop Dogg was on the USC sideline, he was somebody who was a fixture in Miami, associated with this program, helping the kids in a number of different ways. And the stories around this program were all crazy, wonderful terrain. But while Luther Campbell, hold on, I'm gonna get there. Let me just get to the punchline.

• 21:35Pablo Torre?

  You guys were tempted to yada, yada over, yeah, the founder of Two Live Crew was a, it's like, no, we gotta, we gotta explain this.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  Luther Campbell, president of Luke Records and member of the group Two Live Crew. How did it come about that you're a party to a case before the Supreme Court?

• 21:51Speaker 12

  I really don't know. And what happened is they heard Pretty Woman on there and called up Acuprows and Incorporated and then they started suing.

• 22:03Speaker 06

  Can you play a little bit of both the original version and then I'll see your version?

• 22:07Speaker 12

  Let's do Roy first. Let's do Roy first. You wanna hear Roy first? Let's do Roy. Now, you wanna hear that one?

• 22:19Speaker 06

  You wanna hear yours?

• 22:20Speaker 12

  You wanna hear our version? Okay, ladies and gentlemen, coming in from stage right, I think ours is better, too.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  But it keeps getting better. So, the founder of Two Live Crew is putting out bounties on the Notre Dame quarterback, Tony Rice, and Tim Brown, the Heisman Trophy candidate. Bounties that are collected from former UM players who are in the NFL. If you hurt these guys, you can collect the bounty. And the bounty was being held by the team priest.

• 23:03Speaker 07

  Father Leo.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  The team priest was holding the bounty. Like, how?

• 23:08Speaker 07

  Well, who could you trust with all that cash, Dan?

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Who can get mad at me reporting that? That's wonderfully rich detail that anybody would want.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  So, Dan got a bottle to the face.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, cost of business.

• 23:23Speaker 07

  Worth it. Worth it.

• 23:34Pablo Torre?

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• 24:34Speaker 02

  I got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 25:12Pablo Torre?

  So, when you encounter pushback, I feel like in this industry, there are two responses. One is, I don't want to get a bottle thrown at me again. I don't want to be threatened with litigation. I don't want these institutions to marshal all of their assorted forces against me, and therefore, I'm not going to do this. And then, there are you guys. Why?

• 25:36Speaker 07

  Nobody wants to be sued. Nobody wants to be threatened. Nobody wants to have a bottle thrown at them. Nobody wants someone to not take your call when you're calling to talk to them or reach them. At the same time, if those things aren't happening, I'm not sure I'm doing anything right. Because that would mean that I am pulling punches. That would mean that I'm not telling the truth or being candid. I don't want to hurt people's feelings or their careers, per se, but... What I find more often than not is that you get blamed, the messenger gets blamed, rather than the person who's perpetuating some kind of wrongdoing. And, and I, it just strikes me innately that that is just what you're supposed to do with power or with a platform.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  That's the noble part of it, right? In my particular case, and it's a little bit selfish, I'm just chasing interesting. What's interesting, and not necessarily to me, what's interesting to others? He does this as well, and I'm also interested by injustices, and I'd like to rectify injustices. But the starting point is a curiosity on what are the stories that I can tell? The name of his company is Rock and Tour. It's, it's storytelling. And what are the stories that I can tell to move people in a way that's entertaining and interesting, and perhaps also has the added benefit of passing his activism?

• 26:57Speaker 07

  My first documentary, Raw Deal, A Question Of Consent, which nobody has seen, but made us the youngest filmmakers in the history of the Sundance Film Festival at the time, the only ones from South Florida at that time, this was in 2001. And it was about the alleged sexual assault of an exotic dancer at a fraternity house at the University of Florida. And we moved up there to make this documentary on a leave of absence from the University of Miami. And this is, people ask, like, when did you get political? Or when it was like, political, like, we've always been political. Everything is politics, and everything we've ever done is politics. And in this first doc, there was a state attorney of Alachua County by the name of Rod Smith. He later became a state senator. And he would not give me an interview about this case. It was a very high-profile, controversial case. And he wouldn't give me an interview. And I felt a little self-righteous about it, age 21.

• 27:41Speaker 07

  I thought, like, well, this guy is a public servant. He, he has an obligation to engage the press and engage the public and explain some of the more complicated decisions in high-profile cases in particular. And he would, so we sat outside his office. And one day, he walked outside, and I walked up to him with a camera and with a microphone.

• 28:01Speaker 14

  Mr. Smith, we have a few questions about the Delta Chi case. You've commented on a lot of closed cases. Why can't you comment on this closed case, sir? Why this one? Uh, for the... Mr. Mann, why can't we get a written declination for an interview from your office? Mr. Mann?

• 28:16Speaker 14

  Mr. Ma'am, why can't we get a written dedication from your office?

• 28:20Speaker 07

  And so I just walked behind him, talking to the back of his head, asking him questions, one after the other, after the other. But that was day one for me. That was project, project one for me, was, was to try to, you know, punch up, speak truth to power and get answers from people who I think we're entitled to answers from.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  My first indoctrination into all of this was covering for $15 an hour to call city council meetings about sewage. And, and knowing that that's not what I wanted to do, but that crawling through the sewage, not unlike Shawshank, would finally get me to some of the places that were beyond my dreams, because I wasn't imagining any of this. I wasn't doing it to be political, to be activist, to be any of that stuff. And obviously, I gravitated over to the playpen and the nonsense.

• 29:10Speaker 07

  I think I should make this confession, in case it's not clear, and I don't know that I've ever said it out loud before, but in that moment, on Raw Deal, walking around, call it chasing or demanding answers from that state attorney, I liked it. There was an adrenaline kick out of that for me. Punching up and it just, it, it felt right and it felt good. And maybe that's why I haven't done cocaine, is that I found a different high, I guess.

• 29:37Pablo Torre?

  Your cocaine was talking about cocaine.

• 29:42Speaker 07

  And, and demanding answers from people who we deserve answers from, who refuse to give them. So, so when people call and don't take my call, is there a kind of a little bit of a thrill that like, oh, they're, they're scared of me? Maybe, maybe I, maybe that's something that I now enjoy a bit.

• 30:00Pablo Torre?

  I'm glad we started with the whole, like, you know, the cocaine and the popcorn stuff, because I think the whole mission statement, though, is to show that you could do accountability journalism, but it's also fun, right? Like, you don't want to feel like you're being guilted. You want to feel like, oh, my God, I'm, I'm enjoying this in ways that I didn't really anticipate. And sports, to me, Dan, that, that was like, you know, Trojan horses may be too conniving a metaphor, but that's always the power of sports to me. And that's why all these things seem to unite.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  I don't know if Billy still has the most viewed documentary in the history of Hulu, but chasing down Falwell's kid to reveal that he enjoyed pool boy cucking.

• 30:42Pablo Torre?

  You gotta tell this story. You gotta tell this story.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  I just did. Didn't I? Didn't I just tell it? But then...

• 30:47Pablo Torre?

  Now you've got an episode title, Pablo. Pool boy cucking.

• 30:54Speaker 15

  As a pool tenant, I would get hit on, but if I would have known that accepting this woman's invitation to go back to her hotel room would have led to a scandal involving the president of the largest Christian university in the world and the president of the United States, I would have walked away and just enjoyed my private life.

• 31:10Pablo Torre?

  I want to use the character of Giancarlo Grande and the Jerry Falwell Jr. story as a way in because on some level, it's like, oh yeah, of course, it's a Miami hotel pool boy who becomes the character in the cucking of this... I mean, please explain Jerry Falwell Jr. to people who don't know.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  I feel like you've done it with simply the word cuck. I feel like that's done it. You can use more words. Billy can use more words when only one will suffice, but...

• 31:41Pablo Torre?

  But we're talking about in Jerry Falwell Jr., not merely the son of any priest, as priests are recurring now in this episode as well, but one of the number one religious figures in America, who continues to be this shadow over like the whole movement around conservatism.

• 31:59Speaker 16

  Let me say a word to you who are struggling with debt right now. A bad attitude about money got you in debt. Whenever I'm counseling a couple who's having financial difficulties, I'll say, "Give me your budget now. What's your income? How much are you spending? Where are you putting it? And if I don't see tithes and offerings at the top, I'll say, "There's your problem right there." You're robbing from God. We can't afford right now, Pastor. No, no, you can't afford not to. If you did a miracle, you better put the miracle work in God in your budget.

• 32:29Speaker 07

  So we made this documentary called God Forbid, The Sex Scandal That Brought Down A Dynasty, which I wanted to call Cuckold Cowboys, but Hulu wouldn't let me. And Disney was like, nah, we don't think so. But the story was breaking literally under our feet. Our office is on South Beach. A lot of this past story has to do with a piece of property on Alton Road, like blocks from our office, with an Italian restaurant and liquor store downstairs and a youth hostel upstairs. That was a real estate investment that Jerry Falwell Jr., who and his wife Becky Falwell, these are the president and first lady of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia,

• 33:12Speaker 07

  the largest evangelical Christian college, I think in the world, started by, of course, Jerry Falwell Sr., who was an evangelical pastor, one of the first of the televangelists, and a major mover and shaker in the movement to bring Christian nationalism into the political fold. And the 50-year project, really, to overturn Roe v. Wade. That was sort of the macro of it. The micro of it is that he liked to watch his wife get shoved by a pool boy from the Fountain Blue Hotel while he sat in the cuck chair in the corner. This, I realized at the time, you know, every accusation is a confession. We've learned that on social media

• 33:56Speaker 07

  and we've learned that in the modern political age. And I realized, like, the word cuck really became like this sort of conservative insult on social media. That's the first time I remember being aware of it. And I had to Google it the first time. I'm thinking like, well, how do you know what it is? You know, maybe you're much more familiar with this kink, to borrow a term, than I am. And it turns out every accusation is a confession. Here's this, like, conservative leader. And he is, in fact, if you believe Giancarlo Grande's story, and he had quite a lot of corroboration, an actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness cuck.

• 34:34Pablo Torre?

  Dan is so clearly numb to how insane Miami is. Like, if the theory of all of this larger metallurgic project is, surprise, America is Miami now. Why is Miami this way? Why is it always the thing that draws all of these exaggerated cartoon characters that are corrupt and scandalous and absurd?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Billy would be better at answering this question because he's been great at answering this question for a long time when he says that Miami is 20 years ahead of the rest of America, that today's Miami you'll see soon enough, 20 years from now in America. But when I was growing up in this town, in the pages of the Miami Herald with some of the best columnists that there were, the reason that they loved writing about this city is because you'd go to page 5D of the local section and there's a story in Homestead of a neighborhood crime watch meeting being interrupted while the sheriff is talking because a giant bale of marijuana is falling out of the sky into the pool because a coast guard

• 35:43Speaker 04

  plane is chasing somebody who's dumping drugs. We're not a normal place. He and I have not grown up in a normal place. When I go all over the United States, there's nothing quite like this place. It's awful and it's wonderful. It's just rich with absurdities. Look, all of Florida is a bunch of spring break towns. Hours passes as an international city just because it's covered in drug money. And it's the only reason that Miami gets to be gateway to Latin America. It's drug money and a bunch of different cultures in what is just an otherwise spring break type town, not unlike Daytona, not unlike any of these other places, except that this is where the money and the drugs came through.

• 36:26Speaker 07

  They say the great thing about Miami is it's so close to the United States. I would argue that the great thing about Miami is it's so close to the planet Earth. And the fascinating thing about Miami is not only is it a target-rich environment, it's also the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow, as Dan was saying. And if you want to know what challenges we'll face or calamities will befall us as a nation in the years or decades to come, you look at what's happening in the state of Florida, or more specifically, South Florida.

• 36:59Speaker 17

  Are you the kind of sports fan that wants to dig into the story behind the stats? Then join us daily on The Athletic Live, where we'll be live on YouTube to cover all the sports stories you can't stop talking about. On game days, we watch the biggest matchups, live alongside The Athletic's most tapped-in reporters. Or come hang on an off-night for an inside look at how headlines happen. We want you dropping questions in the chat, and we'll bring answers, straight from the source. The Athletic Live is presented by Google Gemini. Subscribe now on YouTube.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up! Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  The work he does for free to tackle people who should be doing a better job needs to be supported. It needs to be supported even if there's a cost. It needs to be supported, especially because there's a cost, because fewer people will do it when there's a cost.

• 38:26Pablo Torre?

  I have watched so much of Billy's work, and I've watched so much of his Hollywood oeuvre. And of course, I'm referring to the seminal NBC television movie called Archie to Riverdale and Back Again.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Come on!

• 38:43Speaker 18

  Archie!

• 38:45Speaker 19

  Say hello to your Uncle Archie.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  He's not my uncle.

• 38:48Speaker 18

  Oh, that's okay. Just call me Archie.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Super dumb name.

• 38:53Speaker 18

  Yeah, maybe. But it's not half as dumb as Jughead Jr.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  You call me that again and something really bad will happen.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  I do not know if it's the writing that's worse or the acting.

• 39:08Speaker 19

  Somehow they got the Archie Comics IP. And they're like, "We need Archie and we need Jughead, but wait for it, Jughead has a son who sucks."

• 39:18Speaker 07

  They're going to their 15-year high school reunion. It's like, nobody wants to see Archie in those characters like that. Talk about a squandered IP opportunity there. Totally. It's so, so bad.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  I did not think that we would start with broke and then you'd find something that he was more embarrassed by.

• 39:36Speaker 07

  It gets even worse in that movie than that clip. I mean, it's pure culture vulturing in that, in that, in that movie. But it reminded me, "Oh no, oh no, you're not gonna show that clip."

• 39:48Speaker 04

  You think he's got everything on you? You think, you think, what, what clip do you think it is?

• 39:53Speaker 19

  No, no, no. Never mind. Wait a minute, you, you didn't realize that Jughead Jr. loves rap?

• 39:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 40:05Speaker 19

  Yee-haw!

• 40:09Speaker 19

  Sugar. Ah, honey, honey. You are my candy girl, and you got me.

• 40:17Speaker 19

  Sugar. Ah, honey, honey. You are my candy girl, and you got me rocking you.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Break it down for me, please.

• 40:25Speaker 19

  When I kissed you, girl, never knew how sweet a kiss could be. Then you laid your ever-loving stuff on me.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Break it down for me, fella.

• 40:33Speaker 19

  I'm gonna make your life so sweet, rocking, moving, shaking and stuck. I'm gonna rock the world complete, rocking, moving, who can say what?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Sugar.

• 40:46Speaker 19

  Ah, honey, honey.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  You are my candy girl.

• 40:50Speaker 19

  And you got me rocking you. Break it down, won't you, please?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Sugar.

• 40:54Speaker 19

  Ah, honey, honey.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  You are my candy girl.

• 40:58Speaker 19

  And you got me rocking you. Break it down, come on! And you got me, and you got me, and you got me!

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Break it down, won't you, please?

• 41:10Speaker 19

  Now, is that a...

• 41:14Speaker 01

  It was teamwork, Dan.

• 41:15Speaker 19

  Yo, give me five, my man.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  You a fish, yeah, kid.

• 41:18Speaker 19

  Oh, you were styling too, my man? Oh, did you see that move I busted?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:21Speaker 19

  Oh, I was grooving.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  I can't be seen with Billy anymore.

• 41:26Pablo Torre?

  I mean, Luther Campbell should have put a bounty on you for what you did.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  It'd be better if I had been abused. At least I'd have an excuse. I just, like, I... Dan, that was like, that, Dan's face, it was like one of those, it was like one of those Two Girls, One Cup reaction videos.

• 41:41Pablo Torre?

  It really, it was.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  I, I know, I want to hear you explain that, Pablo, because I know you don't let us drop any pop culture, uh, uh, references without explaining it to your audience what Two Girls, One Cup is.

• 41:52Pablo Torre?

  What you just heard there was Jughead and Jughead Jr. rapping to great applause. And when I tell you that it's worse than the video of two girls eating [BLEEP] out of a cup, I am not journalistically exaggerating.

• 42:09Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for joining us.

• 42:19Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 43:16Speaker 20

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